


lover, be good to me

by Irrelevancy



Category: One Piece
Genre: Alternate Universe - Priests, Alternate Universe - Religious, BDSM, Bible Quotes, Bloodplay, Confessional, Crisis of Faith, Flogging, Improper Use of Catholic Rituals, M/M, No Smut, Priest!Marco, Religion Kink, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Shanks goes to confession, Theology, but it's sexual as fuck kdjsfnsd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:33:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21604579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Irrelevancy/pseuds/Irrelevancy
Summary: present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God(Romans 12:1)Marco/Shanks unrepentant catholicism kink.
Relationships: Akagami no Shanks | Red-Haired Shanks/Fushichou Marco | Phoenix Marco
Comments: 17
Kudos: 32





	lover, be good to me

**Author's Note:**

> literally NOBODY asked but i'm dELIVERING ANYWAYS.
> 
> lucky, I love you and thank you for indulging my 9AM forays into random kinks.  
> DEPTHS HAPPY BIRTHDAY AND I HOPE YOUR BOOKS ARE OKAY.

“But I don’t understand Father,” Shanks said, drawing the tails of the discipline over the bible Marco clutched in his hands. The knots of rope scratched across leather in a teasing, ominous sound. “Who insists on the discipline, the priest or God?”

“Insistence is done by man,” Marco answered, mouth dry and voice charred incense. They hadn’t even spoken for that long in the confession, and Marco’s throat already felt so used. “The body is natural and nature dies yoi. To mortify the body is to train the soul for virtuous eternity.”

With a casual gesture but intentional eyes, Shanks tossed the discipline over his shoulder, and winced when the tails contacted nerve endings through his shirt. Marco swallowed and gripped his bible harder, the pages creaking.

“Yeah, but who wants to be eternal?”

“The soul _is_ eternal,” Marco insisted. “It’s only a matter of where it ends up in that immortality.”

Around them, liquid wax toppled over melting edges and dribbled down candle stems, drying into opaque white droplets on the wood, pewter, and gold of the church. With Shanks, unrepentant and alight like a bushfire in the center of it all, Marco felt suddenly ashamed of the opulent decorations—who insisted on these riches, God or man?

“Fine yoi—here’s another way of looking at it. The suffering body shares in the suffering and passions of Jesus Christ.”

“And who wouldn’t want to share passions with Christ?” The smile that slanted across Shanks’ mouth was mired in filthy suggestion, and Marco held on to his book and his rosary so as to not transfer that crushing grip onto Shanks. When that apple was in Eve’s hands, did she feel the same overwhelming urge to destroy? To see juice leak from it the same color as its skin, to _consume_ , in truth and totality the forbidden thing? So that she might’ve gone straight to Hell where no fig leaves were necessary.

“I see,” Shanks was continuing, one hand straying to his hip. Marco watched the weave of his rough fingertips through the leather of his belt, their dragging cinch on what used to be skin. “So it’s about getting closer to holiness. Sounds awfully narcissistic to me.”

Marco reeled back as if struck, rosary beads drumming loudly against his book at the precise tempo of his pulse.

“Narci—”

“Worship,” Shanks interrupted, words prowling in a predatory slink, “requires distance. No true acolyte can _become_ what he reveres. So tell me Father, which one are you playing at? God or piety?”

The grind of Marco’s teeth sounded like the walls of the church coming down. The building was wholly empty; they’d be the only casualties. Death was not the scary thought—it was the possibility that regardless of all he’s done, all the prayers he’s uttered and all the souls he’s pronounced to have saved, he and a man like Shanks might still travel down the same road after death, all thanks to _this_ , whatever they started playing at the moment Shanks entered Marco’s confession. That was the thought traveling in shivers down his spine.

“I strive for closeness yoi, not becoming,” he snapped. “I strive for submission to pain in the same way as Christ, I—”

All of a sudden, Shanks was advancing, and Marco found his breath catching and his feet stumbling back. He hit the confession booth, intricate wood pressing whorls into his shirt. And Shanks strolled right up, all the way forward, until his elbow was rested across Marco’s sternum and he could _lean_ his weight into it.

Those same rough fingers teased under the cream of Marco’s clerical collar. Marco’s Adam’s apple bobbed against his knuckles.

“Tell me more,” Shanks murmured, red hair red tongue so temptingly close to Marco’s mouth, daring him to bite. “About you submitting to pain.”

The discipline hung from Shanks’ hand between them, as fakely innocent as that smile Shanks liked to put on for confession. Shanks saw him watching and gave his wrist a teasing little flick. The knots tapped along the top of Marco’s thigh, the protrusion of his pelvic bone.

“I already agreed—” Marco didn’t know why his voice was coming out on the verge of a gasp. He blamed Shanks’ arm, the aching dig of pressure into his ribs and chest. “—to show you, yoi. I don’t intend to go back on my word.”

“I don’t intend to let you,” was Shanks’ agreement. The back of Marco’s clerical collar popped open with a pull like the undoing of bones at the joint. Pinched between two fingers, the strip of fabric slipped off and, in a repeated gesture, Shanks flung it over his shoulder. It hit the side of a pew and tumbled across the floor. Shanks’ teeth in a smirk were the color of apple flesh. “Christ sacrificed himself on the Cross for all of humanity, right? Do you feel closer to him when you sacrifice yourself to me?”

For the past six months, since the red of Shanks’ blood first graced the doors of the church, some terrible intimacy had been growing under Marco’s skin. Like an extra rib, spousal and committed. In those initial months, Marco fostered the naive belief that this was just another manifestation of his Godly devotion, bringing another stray lamb into the fold. In time though, he’s come to believe in a terrifying something else. Shanks was no lamb. He was striped and jungled. Half a candle’s burn ago, when Marco’d broken the seal of confession and held—grabbed, really—Shanks’ hand for the first time to make him stay, to whom was Marco’s devotion aimed?

All these questions with no answers in sight. Just, as Marco’s eyes focused, the discipline in the foreground, Shanks in the middle, and the church’s statue of the crucified Christ in warm pewter hung in the back. All symbols of Marco’s _pain—_ the most metamorphic version of it—in telescopic overlay.

Marco undid the top button of his shirt collar with a trembling finger, and felt his skin begin to burn.

“I will,” Marco vowed, bible and rosary still rattling about in one hand as he more determinedly began to shed his shirt, threads tearing, with Shanks having drawn back, watching him in muted strangeness, “take your sin.”

_Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was t_ _hree weeks_ _ago—_ _m_ _y sin is this. I’ve been having impure thoughts about my priest._

The black shirt fell to the ground with a breath, and Marco, shivering in the sudden chill, turned his back to Shanks. Imagining a marble pillar before him, he pressed his fingers through the swirling wood of the confession box, planted his feet, and bowed his head.

Shanks swore with such uncharacteristic intensity that Marco flinched as if already struck. Hands closed around his, pulling him insistently free of his self-imposed flogging post and turning him around in the circle of Shanks’ arms.

Shanks was _glowering_ , the promised darkness of all his more ambiguous confessions finally clotting and rising to the top. That hand, back at Marco’s throat, shoving Marco against the confession once more. Marco hung there against that pinning strength, whorled wood catching on his skin like a child’s fingers seeking parental cloth.

“Then you face me,” Shanks insisted, swishing the discipline in a hand to warm up, “as I give it to you.”

_I have been fantasizing about hurting him. I wondered what it’d be like to hold the flogger, to strike his body, to draw blood and make him cry._

Marco dropped his hands down to his side, and thought, if he were protecting the confession and the church behind him, he’d have his palms turned to the back. Instead, his life and fate and heart and head lines were all spread open toward Shanks, ripe for the taking, for the shredding.

The first strike was merciless, whipping streaks of pain right down the longest diagonal path across Marco’s torso. He gasped, then cried out at the continuously blooming pain. Felt tears well up before he determinedly blinked them down again.

Then Marco glared up at Shanks. Rolled his shoulders back to ready himself for more.

“Oh, Father,” Shanks husked in dark-eyed appreciation. He too straightened his back, and started swinging from the _elbow_. “Keep it up. You might save me yet.”

When Shanks at last drew blood, he asked Marco for a prayer or biblical verse.

“What story does your faith tell you Father?” he asked, flicking the discipline in almost fevered little strokes against the lines of broken skin over Marco’s left pectoral. The bleeding heart—Shanks must’ve done that on purpose. “Show me where they’ve convinced you your blood is worth my sins.”

Marco’s arms were so stiffly locked that it took Shanks’ gentling, a momentary cessation of pain, for him to regain motor control. With shaking hands and a defiant hiss warning Shanks’ support away, he brought his bible closer to his face, awash with heat. It only took him a moment to find the page in Romans.

“Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” His voice was trembling too as he read, but he needed, _needed_ Shanks to hear this. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect—”

The discipline caught him in a blow across his throat and collarbone, so hard that Marco felt his trachea closing around a choke. With breathing an agony in and outside his body, Marco squeezed his eyes shut hard enough to finally let the tears fall. He was as tense as a statue, an icon carved to suffer, bible still open and soldered to his hand.

“And have you?” Shanks asked quietly, at a distance that allowed him the best strikes. Through bleary eyes, Marco could tell that both his hands were free now, the discipline laid to rest on the pew behind him. He must have combed through the tails on the discipline before he set it down, for streaks of Marco’s blood dotted his hands. He reached across the space between them now to smear it to Marco’s cheek. “Have you discerned my will?”

Marco’s incredulous, near-hysterical burst of laughter morphed straight into a sob, when Shanks’ nails _scratched_ down the side of Marco’s bleeding neck. Marco heard liquid droplets hitting paper. The church, with its flames and reflective surfaces and _Shanks_ and the blood, was becoming all too washed in red. A river of red on the floodplain of Marco’s senses, and Marco batted viciously away the locust swarm of Shanks’ implication.

“You are _not_ my God, yoi.”

_Then why have you taken his discipline?_

But the nature of swarms was their indefatigable assault, the buzzing wings of unpleasant questions penetrating Marco’s consciousness. In the throes of vicious discomfort, Marco did as he was always taught to do—turn to the words of the holy book. _My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline._ Hebrews. _A_ _nd do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves._

Did Shanks love him? It hadn’t taken Marco more than a thought to give the man first aid, when Shanks first collapsed on his church doors of suspicious wounds Marco knew better than to pry into in this part of town. Then he’d just kept coming back, day after day after day, to the faith he’s abandoned (and that had first abandoned him, was Marco’s suspicion) just to fill Marco’s confession box with human acts that only so barely masqueraded as sin. Just to make Marco laugh, on the rare occasions Marco gave in to the temptation.

Then, the mugging, the robbery, Marco’s ransacked room and all his scant belongings destroyed. The silent, _silent_ confession that followed, Shanks and Marco each fitting into their respective sides of the box so snugly like bullets in their chambers. Shanks’ ominous parting words: _I won’t ask for forgiveness for something I won’t regret doing, Father_. And then—nothing. Silence. Shanks gone from his life for three whole weeks, twenty-one days, infinite confessions that failed to be, _bless me, Father, for I have sinned—my sin is gluttony, Father. I had like, seven lemon glaze donuts today, they’re just too damn good—and oh, on a completely unrelated note, I have five more right here. Go on, take one._

So when Shanks finally came back, three weeks later, with a confession that was awful in a whole other way, Marco couldn’t let him just _disappear_ again. The intent was to scare Marco off, that much was obvious—but it was Marco who agreed to this. It was Marco who handed Shanks the discipline and tore his own shirt. It was Marco who bared his chest to ask for love, for grace, for rebuke.

“You’re right,” Shanks hummed in low reply. “I’m no God, because God doesn’t lie, does He? I’ve lied. By omission, but I’ve lied.”

“Is this another confession?” Marco murmured, mind hazy with exhaustion and pain. He felt more than saw Shanks’ hand drop onto the bible, fingers wet with Marco’s sweat and blood and tears scrunching up a sticking page.

“If you’d like. Bless me Father, et cetera. _Here’s_ what I omitted from my last confession.”

Shanks’ fingers clawed until the top page, white-stained-red, tore completely free. It made the same sound the discipline did shredding Marco’s skin. Then he brought the page—Romans, the epistle offering salvation—up to Marco’s face.

Crumpled it into Marco’s mouth.

“I don’t just want to strike my priest.” Hellfire wasn’t as hot as Shanks’ fingers _hooking_ that paper behind cheek and teeth. Brimstone had nothing on the _viciousness_ in Shanks’ eyes. “I want to debauch him. I want to spread him open, penetrate him, swallow him down. I want to douse him in the sins of his faith until he’s so utterly _ruined_ , that he cannot even think of putting on the cloth again without smearing God in his own filth.”

Marco tasted the paper, as dry on his tongue as communion wafers. He tasted the blood. How reprehensible it felt to be taking his own Eucharist, how _transgressive_. Shanks stood before him like a priest at the altar, like _Marco_ at the altar, taking Marco’s place to feed him penance. His words were a prayer, another epistle penned on the tongue of a saint for sinners falling to their knees. Shanks’ fingers stayed in his mouth even as Marco dropped, pillars of salt.

Marco closed his lips around the holy words, around Shanks—stared right up at the heart of the flames, and began to suckle. Shanks’ face crumpled.

“You—”

The arc of Shanks’ spine as he curve down over Marco was the stuff of Italian marble, the perfect image of pity before _pity_ was distinguishable from _piety_. He cradled Marco’s cheek with his other hand as Marco’s tongue laved slowly against his fingerprints, watching Marco with such startled grief.

“What do I have to _do_ —” he choked out, his rebuke in the sudden thrust of his fingers into the back of Marco’s tongue, but his love in the caress of his thumb, wiping away the trail of saliva that dribbled out when Marco gagged. His voice was hushed with awe when he continued, “for the record, I’m not lying. But I _am_ trying to scare you off. Why aren’t you scaring?”

The bible chose this moment to finally lose its grip on Marco’s sweat-slicked palms, tumbling ungraciously to the floor. The rosary, coiled once around Marco’s wrist, was long enough that the little ivory cross clattered against the floor. Shanks watched it go, gaze darkening once more.

“Or is it that your faith protects you?” Shanks’ shoe—patent leather stained with blood then cleaned then stained then cleaned again—lifted and, very deliberately, stepped on the cross. It began dragging across the floor, stretching Marco’s arm with it. “To suffer me is to martyr yourself to me.” The grasp of Shanks’ hands on Marco’s face was so very _sad,_ then bitter, then vengeful. “Is this what you think, Father? That no matter what I do to you, you get to be clean of me?”

The page of the bible, now soaked in spit, was roughly extracted from Marco’s mouth along with Shanks’ fingers. In one forceful kick, Shanks yanked at the cross, clearly intending for Marco to stretch and fall with it, to prostrate himself across the ground. And then—what? More of Shanks talking? More of Shanks’ confessions or penance or whatever the fuck this was, with Marco still just playing the part of the silent martyr? Marco, all of a sudden, has had quite _enough_. He’s had enough of his own ebbing and flowing guilt, the ember of what he _knew_ he desired buffeted by winds of uncertainty. Shanks was in _pain_ , more so than Marco’s broken skin and aching throat, and Marco had been the one to deal it to him by taking the easy way out. Peter 5:7, _cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you_. He _cared_ , so Marco couldn’t let him take the Fall on his own.

With a hearty jerk of his arm, Marco snapped the string of his rosary and surged up to his feet. Beads, worn by pious rubbing and scented with Marco’s daily touch, scattered irreparably across the floor. It was Marco’s turn to take up Shanks’ face in his hands, weathering the vivid shock in the part of Shanks’ lips with caressing fingers. Years on the rosary had left their mark on Marco too—beading callouses on thumb and forefinger. _See?_ he wanted to say to Shanks. _Tougher than you think._

“I _refuse_ to lose you,” Marco practically snarled. He must be such a gruesome sight, half-stripped and streaked with blood, icons of his faith in tatters and rot strewn all around. The sun had set and the candles have melted enough to get their revenge on the flame—gold and pewter sat cooling, and the face of the hanging Christ was rapidly sinking into shadow.

“Am I your lost sheep?” Shanks huffed out a humorless laugh.

That’s when Marco kissed him. Lips in lips, lips in teeth. The transfer of blood and ink. Marco imagined perfect imprints of Letter to the Romans on the inside of his cheeks and Shanks’ eager tongue lapping it up. The sinner finally taking the Holy Communion directly from Marco’s mouth—Marco was the tabernacle flung open and Shanks his most starved apostle. _This is my body given for you_ , Marco thought, Luke 22. _The new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you._

Shanks consumed him in sacrifice; Marco’s never felt so harrowingly holy.

He pulled away with great reluctance, a bridge of saliva clinging between them like the bridge of hands clinging between them: Marco’s woven into Shanks’ shirt and Shanks’ a blissful cilice, pinned into Marco’s wounds.

“Now we share in sin and grace,” he told Shanks. A great and sudden fount of humor geysered in his chest, and he could see the same flood of incredulous joy into Shanks’ eyes as well.

“You _must_ play at piety,” Shanks muttered, “‘cause that was the least priestly kiss I’ve ever known.”

“Been kissing a lot of priests, have you yoi?” Marco grumbled in reply.

“I—Hang on, just like that, we’re good? Or you’re good with me?” Or perhaps, in Shanks, there still remained more incredulity than joy, an imbalance that Marco found unacceptable, and frowned at. “So, what, have you saved me or have I damned you?”

“All who Fall do it by their own actions,” Marco insisted, “how could you damn me?”

“Have you heard nothing of what I said in the past hour,” was Shanks’ flat reply. “I want you hurt and ruined.”

“So hurt and ruin me, yoi.” Though it brought heat to his cheeks to say those words, Marco steadied the path of his tongue anyways. The penitent has done his confession; it was the Father’s turn to offer absolution. “ _Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand._ Isaiah 53.”

Then, “ _My power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses. I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong._ 2 Corinthians 12.”

Those holy words in an unstoppable flood, and Shanks was the ark he sought to buoy, to render alive and thriving, full of joyous coupling. Marco’s craft was the art of belief, and he knew a man on the verge of faith when he saw one.

“ _I rejoice_ ,” Marco spoke to Shanks, smearing a streak of gentle red across Shanks’ forehead and down his cheek. Baptism by blood, an induction of Shanks to this life, this salvation. “ _In my sufferings for you, and fulfill in my flesh that which is lacking._ Colossians.”

Catechesis settled fully into Shanks, until eyes went soft and limbs released from their wooden rigidity. He opened his mouth for Marco and, when Marco approached, gently bit down until flesh turned white turned red.

“I believe you,” Shanks finally conceded, when he released Marco again. “You know why? ‘Cause you actually went out of your way to memorize all the dirtiest passages in the Bible for this. You _love_ discipline, clearly, and it’s got fuck all to do with me. You’re either the best or worst priest in the world.”

“Like I said yoi,” Marco acknowledged with a cringe, “sin and grace.”

The last of the candles went out, settling them in air the color of ash and dust, the clean flush of night soaking between their limbs. Their hands were moved to gentle exploration, neither knowing nor caring who began it. Shanks’ shirt fell open, his pectorals caressed. Marco shivered at the feathering graze of nails against the small of his back. Finally, with a muted little sigh, Shanks settled himself against Marco’s chest, neck bowed to press his forehead over Marco’s heart. The clotted debris of blood rubbed against them both.

“Y’know, I think you’ve actually done it. The impossible.” Shanks’ quiet chuckle sounded wet, and Marco rubbed a hand down his spine, in supplication once more. “Is this how it feels to be saved?”

The heart of that question wasn’t meant to be answered by Marco, so Marco kept silent. There was though, one thing he knew he could do for Shanks, right now, in this trying moment of heartache.

Extricating himself from Shanks’ hold, Marco bent down to his fallen bible. The words were barely visible given the lack of light, but the book wasn’t opened far from where he needed it to be. The page came to him, and he tore it out with one smooth stroke.

“One more quote from Romans yoi,” he told Shanks, pressing the page to Shanks’ chest until Shanks took it up in a confused hand. “ _And it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved._ ”

And Marco was back on his knees. Fingers weaved into the leather of Shanks’ belt. Uncinched it from the notches. He smirked, teeth the wicked white of apple flesh.

“So let me show you how it feels to be saved, yoi.”

**Author's Note:**

> the donut lines belong to lucky with her PhD in Shanks
> 
> everything I know about catholicism came from being a fake English major kdsjnfksdjfs
> 
> AND, [DaemonumX's fantastic episodes on Catholicism kink on Why are People into That?](https://play.acast.com/s/yapit/3ad9b313-436d-48e9-bc19-4ab948d4ab78). Bless her IG [divinesubmission](https://www.instagram.com/divinesubmission/) for almost all the spicy bible quotes here.
> 
> As always, my [Tumblr](https://touchmycoat.tumblr.com/). I anticipate two (three?) people to actually read this fksjdnfksdjnfs and I love. All of you.


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